I've been having a few quirks with 2009.0 and various updates (shutdown screen has garbled graphics and sometimes now fails to shutdown entirely forcing a hard reboot; all kernel updates reassign my grub boot locations pointing them to the Windows hard drive instead of the drive they were assigned to which I have to manually fix every freaking time, etc....but at least it didn't try to INSTALL there....)

Anyway, I was hoping the update to 2009.1 might solve some of these irritating things, but instead I got an almost immediate "Installation Failed" notice along with it pointing me to a log file where the only thing it says is:

No protocol specified
Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0 at /usr/bin/gurpmi line 28.

That's all it cares to tell me as to WHY the update failed. It's not much to go on. I don't know what protocol it's talking about and I have no clue why it wouldn't be able to open a display at :0. The update from 2008 to 2009.0 went smoothly (other than it screwing up the boot location in grub). I guess I could download the DVD and start over, but then I tend to ask myself if it's not time to try another distribution while I'm at it. Maybe it's time to give Ubuntu another try? Does anyone have a smooth install/upgrade process these days? I never have these kinds of issues on my Macs or with Windows. Now I see Mandriva is advertising online backup storage for a monthly fee. Gee, I wonder if that means their support for local backups will be non-existent? Is there anything they won't try to come up with a money-making scheme for? (Hence my thoughts about going to Ubuntu while I'm at it).

Wel gurpmi is the graphical front end for urpmi .
Urpmi is a CLI package for installing software.
Although I am not in favor to upgrade it usely works if you only use Mandriva software.
But how is configuration is it a dual boot from one HD or did you use two HD ?
I am assuming that you use 2 HD

Since you seem to be haveing issues with grub in MDV 2009.0, you may be best served to do a clean installation rather than an upgrade (but only if you have your /home directory located on its own partition).

If you have Mandriva installed on a single data partition (and one or more swap partitions), see my comment numbered #4 in this thread. It contains information that may be helpful if you want to move your /home directory to its own partition. The advantage of this configuration is that when you perform a clean installation of Mandriva, during the installation process your root partition is formatted (erasing all data on it) but the partition containing your /home directory is not so your existing user configuration will not be erased.

When you get to the partitioning section of the installation, choose the option to "use existing partitions" and (to be on the safe side) make sure that the partition containing your /home directory is NOT check marked for formatting (there will be a list of partitions that CAN be formatted).

HTH,